New Video — San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico

Miguel and Alexis of La Punta Realty — Christie’s Great Esates vis­ited San Miguel de Allende a few months ago to wel­come Joanie Bar­cal of Allende Prop­er­ties to the Christie’s Great Estates lux­ury real estate network.

Our shoot­ers had a blast with this pho­to­genic town and only wished we had more time. Here is a video La Punta Realty Mar­ket­ing put together to pro­mote San Miguel using the song ” Ojalá Que Llueva Café” by Cafe Tacuba.

San Miguel de Allende is the seat of the munic­i­pal­ity of Allende, Gua­na­ju­ato, Mex­ico, a his­toric town founded in 1542 that has become an attrac­tive tourist des­ti­na­tion for wealthy Mex­ico City res­i­dents and has a large Amer­i­can and Cana­dian expa­tri­ate com­mu­nity com­posed pri­mar­ily of retirees.

His­tory

The town was founded in 1542 by the Fran­cis­can monk Fray Juan de San Miguel. It was an impor­tant stopover on the Antiguo Camino Real, part of the sil­ver route from Zacate­cas, Zacate­cas. The town fea­tured promi­nently in the Mex­i­can War of Inde­pen­dence. Gen­eral Igna­cio Allende, one of San Miguel’s native sons, was a lead­ing player in the war against Spain for inde­pen­dence. Allende, cap­tured in bat­tle and beheaded, is a national hero. San Miguel el Grande renamed itself “San Miguel de Allende” in 1826 in honor of his actions.

By 1900, San Miguel de Allende was in dan­ger of becom­ing a ghost town. Declared a national his­toric mon­u­ment in 1926 by the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment, devel­op­ment in the his­toric dis­trict is restricted in order to pre­serve the town’s colo­nial char­ac­ter. Dur­ing the Cris­tero upris­ing in Mex­ico, when clergy and their fam­i­lies were per­se­cuted, the grand­chil­dren of Gen. Mar­i­ano Escobedo came to San Miguel de Allende, which was con­ve­niently secluded.

In the 1950s, San Miguel de Allende became a des­ti­na­tion known for its beau­ti­ful colo­nial archi­tec­ture and its ther­mal springs. After World War II San Miguel began to revive as a tourist attrac­tion as many demo­bi­lized United States GIs dis­cov­ered that their edu­ca­tion grants stretched fur­ther in Mex­ico at the U.S.-accredited art schools, the privately-owned Insti­tuto Allende, founded in 1950, and the Bel­las Artes, a nation­ally char­tered school.

Amer­i­can ex-servicemen first arrived in 1946 to study at the art school. By the end of 1947, Life mag­a­zine assigned a reporter and pho­tog­ra­pher to do an arti­cle on this post-war phe­nom­e­non. A three-page spread appeared in the Jan­u­ary 5, 1948, edi­tion under the head­line “GI Par­adise: Vet­er­ans go to Mex­ico to study art, live cheaply and have a good time.” This was pos­si­ble when apart­ments rented for US$10 a month, ser­vants cost US$8 a month, rum was 65 cents a quart and cig­a­rettes cost 10 cents a pack.

As a result of the pub­lic­ity, more than 6,000 Amer­i­can vet­er­ans imme­di­ately applied to study at the school. Stir­ling Dick­in­son thought that San Miguel, which then had a pop­u­la­tion of fewer than 10,000, could only han­dle another 100 vet­er­ans, bring­ing the stu­dent body to around 140.

Vet­er­ans

Ex-GIs were more demand­ing than pre­vi­ous stu­dents. Con­tem­po­rary and friend of painter and mural­ist Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, another icon of the Mex­i­can mural move­ment and a vocal mem­ber of the Com­mu­nist Party, was hired as a guest lec­turer. He agreed to work with the stu­dents on a mural of San Miguel’s most famous son, Igna­cio Allende. When Siqueiros reviewed the bud­get, he and the art school’s owner, Alfredo Cam­panella, had a falling out and the artist threw him down a flight of stairs.

The fac­ulty and the major­ity of the stu­dents then walked out in sup­port of Siqueiros. When this forced the school to close in 1949, Dick­in­son opened one of his own. But it did not receive accred­i­ta­tion from the Amer­i­can Embassy, so most of the vet­er­ans either went home or trans­ferred to other Mex­i­can schools.

In the coun­ter­cul­ture years of the 1960s, San Miguel began its career as a cen­ter for Amer­i­can expa­tri­atism and was a pop­u­lar des­ti­na­tion for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as recorded in Tom Wolfe´s novel The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Beat writer Neal Cas­sady died beside the rail­road tracks between San Miguel and Celaya after a party in town.

Attrac­tions

Dur­ing the final week of July, San Miguel de Allende and Gua­na­ju­ato, Gua­na­ju­ato, are co-hosts to the Expre­sión en Corto Inter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val, Mexico’s largest com­pet­i­tive film fes­ti­val and the most pres­ti­gious of its kind in Latin Amer­ica. The inter­na­tion­ally renowned fes­ti­val is free to the pub­lic and screens over 400 films from 10am until 4am each day in 16 venues, which include such unusual loca­tions as San Miguel’s Jardín Prin­ci­pal (or main square), the sub­ter­ranean streets and tun­nels of Gua­na­ju­ato, the Gua­na­ju­ato Mummy Museum and both city’s munic­i­pal grave­yards (Panteones).

The fact that this fes­ti­val uses the city grave­yard as a venue is seen as a com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate abuse by those who have their fam­i­lies and loved ones buried there. Most of the approvals and event man­age­ment are car­ried out by those who are not native to San Miguel and are at best vaguely aware there is some pub­lic dis­may of this event’s (more gory and fright­ened) take on death, vs. the Mex­i­can style of rev­er­ence and cer­e­mony of lov­ing spirits.

San Miguel de Allende was also named a Pueblo Mágico in 2002. In 2008, San Miguel was des­ig­nated by UNESCO as a World Her­itage Site. This despite the fact that UNICEF has been con­cerned about the lack of sewage man­age­ment flow­ing past schools hous­ing thou­sands of chil­dren at the San Juan de Dios neigh­bor­hood. There were sev­eral inef­fec­tive city admin­is­tra­tions and self-proclaimed com­mit­tees vying for the UNICEF funds which then dropped the project until recent com­mit­ments to put sewage into one big pipe. See UNICEF on YouTube.

Murals: In 1941–42 at age 25 Eleanor Coen painted a Mural in fresco in at the Escuela Uni­ver­si­taria de Bel­las Artes. It was dam­aged but has been recently restored. Eleanor was the first woman employed by the TGP in Mex­ico City where she worked with the founders in 1941. At that time her work was influ­enced by Jose Clemente Orozco although her mural’s sub­ject mat­ter, women wash­ing at a river with chil­dren, shows a woman’s point of view.

Recent demo­graphic changes

Famous world­wide for its mild cli­mate, ther­mal springs and colonial-era archi­tec­ture, San Miguel de Allende has attracted a large com­mu­nity of for­eign res­i­dents. Exact fig­ures are dif­fi­cult to obtain since Medicare, the U.S. pub­lic health sys­tem, can­not be claimed abroad, and many expa­tri­ates return reg­u­larly to the United States to receive treat­ment as well as to main­tain their res­i­dence sta­tus in their home coun­try. Both Democ­rats Abroad and Repub­li­cans Abroad have active chap­ters in San Miguel and retain their involve­ment with U.S. pol­i­tics. Cana­dian res­i­dents often live six months in Mex­ico and six months in Canada to main­tain their Cana­dian health coverage.

SMA city gov­ern­ment lead­ers in 2006, as reported in Aten­ción (the local bilin­gual news­pa­per), did real­ize that a pop­u­la­tion surge of for­eign­ers was grow­ing that year and its size could not be doc­u­mented. There was a rash in home sales and con­struc­tion of new hous­ing devel­op­ments, with rapid prof­itable turnover of new hous­ing units. How­ever, the slow­ing of the hous­ing mar­ket in the United States in 2006 was also felt in San Miguel.

Many Mex­i­can and for­eign res­i­dents protested the num­ber of new devel­op­ments in San Miguel in late 2006 and early 2007. Dur­ing this time, a major new super­mar­ket, Mega/Comercial Mex­i­cana, opened at one end of the urban area, and another major shop­ping mall with a Sori­ana super­mar­ket, an eight-screen movie the­ater, an Office Depot and a McDonald’s opened slightly far­ther away. A 700-space city park­ing lot was built on the edge of the his­toric Cen­tro area to help reduce traf­fic within the city.